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Wengo giving up on Wengophone?

Lately I've been working on an updated version of the comparison between Skype and Wengophone I wrote on June 2006 for Free Software Magazine. While I was working on it, I spotted a number of rather worrying signs:

For several weeks, the OpenWengo community has been keeping embarrassingly quiet.

No nightly builds: they are stuck at 13085, while sources are far ahead.

No commits: sure, nightly builds are a commodity, but it looks like no commits have been done for weeks.

The #openwengo IRC channel is mostly silent. Even the users which used to be chatty (the buildbots) are now quiet.

Some of the most representative people of the community are unavailable.

This kind of sudden silence can't be a good sign. If you compared a software project's health to a person's, Wengophone doesn't seem to have any brain activity and no working internal organs.

So, a number of questions arise; the first one is: has Wengo abandoned the community they gave birth to? Also: should we say goodbye to Wengophone?

I hope Wengophone will stay alive and well, with or without Wengo's funding. Should they give up on the project, I hope a new community will come up and bring a new life to this fantastic piece of software.

Author information

Biography

Born in 1971, Marongiu graduated in applied mathematics in 1997; he's now a full-time system administrator for a well known software company in Oslo, Norway. He's also a Perl programmer and technical author and lecturer by passion.
Marongiu has been a Debian User since version 1.1.10 and he helped found the GULCh Linux Users Group (Gruppo Utenti Linux Cagliari), the first one in Sardinia.